(Just a friendly reminder. This is an enduring theme at VeteransTales.org, one of the pillars of why we opened that site. Veterans play a key role in saving America because they all have wagered so much more skin in the game than other Americans. Veterans as a group, for as far back as the Korean War, were never made aware of just how important they are to America’s survival off the battle field. It’s all about that skin in the game; the delayed life’s-plans, the sweat, the scars that heal and those that can’t, for some, the last full measure, not to mention those who serve by waiting at home.
(Please visit from time to time, feel free to comment and even submit a post.)
Defeating the Left is political, saving America isn’t.
The way the Soviet Empire collapsed is all the proof we need…that the Left can never win in the end, because it is destined, as a creature of its own design, to implode in on top of itself. As a law of Nature, the Globalists, the Fascists, the Marxists, call them what you like since they are a little bit of each, cannot design a system that can sustain itself for more than three generations. (Moving into their 70th year, I think the Chinese Communists even know this.)
The “best” days the Soviets ever had, as masters, were when they were brutalizing their people so much the people had to just try to stay alive every waking moment, and could find no extra time to resist their oppressors. In Stalin’s day hating the Soviets was reserved for the intellectuals rotting away in the gulag. As long as finding a scrap of bread was Job One, people had no time to hate and conspire. That has been a cornerstone of tyranny since the pharaohs.
It was when the Soviet production system was finally brought on-line, and that thick layer of apparatchiks was inserted between the people and the bosses was put into place, and things began to get built; factories, dams, collectives, did the Soviet system begin its slow death spiral. It took 75 years to spin out of control, from Revolution to collapse, but it only took 20 for the die to be cast, when everyone learned their place, 10-20-70, and that it would never change.
At its best the Soviet system could never produce at better then 30% efficiency of their Plan, one 5-Year Plan after another, even after they’d stolen all sorts of technologies from the West. Stalin called it “wrecking” and wrecking it was, only he had to invent straw-men to blame, since he possessed the same blindness to the perfectness of his plans as the modern Left is today. He never understood they were fighting Nature itself.
By their 50th year, to enhance production they began giving the people more and more reason to get out of bed every day; better tenements, piped-in radios with only one station and four songs, shorter lines at the bread store, even a few days off and a group bus ticket to visit Moscow and the “stations-of-the-red star” for Lenin, who they enshrined as a messiah in 1970, with little pins to commemorate the visit. The State even gave them lime to pour around their outhouses.
Nonetheless, efficiency leveled at 30%, the Russian people finding even more ways to trick the state. I got to see this first hand.
What is remarkable in this samizdat resistance that brought down an empire and an economic system is that the Russians were a peoples who had never known freedom at all in 1917; no books, no media, no contacts with the West. They had no cultural memory of good things that had been lost, only a hatred from what they instinctively didn’t like.
Cultural and political anthropologists would be wise to note this. The Russian people proved that there is deep inside Man a resistance to tyranny that had existed long before recorded history.
The life-span of the captured Eastern Bloc of the Soviet Empire was cut in half, for their peoples had all known freedom in their recent memories. So resistance, and wrecking, began almost immediately, and it all came tumbling down within 45 years.
Of course, the people who would control the New World Order today, and America’s place in it, like every tyrant who came before them, will believe that they have developed a new-and-improved product that will withstand the tests of time (this time); a higher understanding of Science, and full control of technologies unknown in the Soviet days. They envision a world without hunger, but only after appetites and populations have been pared to more manageable levels. It will still be a 10-20-70 world, only the bosses won’t be cut from the same cloth as those gnarly-fisted Russians. Or so they think.
Still, this too will fail, all within the requisite 45-to-75 years span.
That’s the good news. Now for the bad news.
What will emerge?
The jury is still out in the Eastern Bloc, but much, much more so in the old USSR proper. The Catholic and eastern Orthodox countries are stronger in faith and morality, stronger because they never entirely went away. The Russian Church was moribund before the Revolution, so there is less there to recapture. The same for Ukraine and Byelo-Russia.
Morally the Russian parts of the Soviet Empire have been trying to steer their ships without any fixed stars in their heavens for 26 years and I can find no sign that they have found any of those lost stars that define a healthy society. Small business is nearly non-existent because it is still not free, local mafia(s) inserting themselves into the economy during the Yeltsin interregnum. This mafia-small business overlordship is less prevalent in the old eastern satellites. New wealth is being created, but 25 years into the experiment, the outcome is still in the air.
Patriotism is strong in all these countries, but it is different in each. What it stands for is unclear, freedom or strength? Outward Russian expressions of patriotism is about being able to kick every else’s ass. Again. Russia went from Marxist-Communist to Oligarchic-Fascist a bit too quickly to satisfy anyone’s hope for a pleasant outcome in the next 27 years.
On the other hand, Polish patriotism is wrapped in the classical ideals of liberty and freedom. Their problems are that to their east there is a country that would like to kick their ass (along with the Czechs, Hungarians, Croats, Slovenians) while to the west they are witnessing an abdication of those very same classical ideals by the Western European.
But a Soviet-borne tolerance for promiscuity (sex was free, other vices cost money, and the people had none) promises that a struggle will continue for many years to come. Despite having the most vibrant religious cultures in Europe, the lure of western Europe’s new found love of an amorality that has already condemned them to die out as separate national identities in the next century, the cancer may be spreading.
I was sort of hoping America could help them resist.
People came to America in search of greater economic freedom, but usually carrying a valise-full of moral norms consistent with the overall religious norms for the early 20th Century. It still is a multi-generational process to “become America” and to be able to grasp the larger sense of liberty that ideal implies.
If the Left wins, even for a generation, that entire process, what we once called “assimilation” to a set of ethical standards that was passed on from parent-to-child, to be repeated as long as the line survives…may be lost. What may emerge even in a generation will not be even remotely “American” as we know it to be today, in part because that is what we know the Left wants most to destroy.
If the aftermath of this last election taught us anything, it should have taught us that “To Be American” is what the Left hopes to achieve, and they can most certainly do this, in fact, are doing this, and defeating them politically may yet give them the last laugh…the same sort of last laugh the Islamists in Europe think they soon be able to get. .
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